STOP BLAMING "BAD MEN", YOUR FIRST LOVE SET THE STANDARD

In this episode of Suitt & Boot, we delve deeper into daddy issues how they frame relationships. 

From the first man who taught you what love looks like…
to the relationships you keep repeating…
to the moment you finally wake up and choose differently.

Tshai shares her personal story of:

Growing up as “daddy’s little girl”
Discovering the illusion she was living in
Watching generational patterns play out in real time
Repeating those same patterns in her own marriage
And the moment she chose to break the cycle.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:13

We are the real I stop like a beer chicken like a deer being ticket like a ton of fire in the light like a cheer I'm gonna do this up in here we're real This is Suit and Boot Standing Up in Truth Transformation and Breaking Out of Trauma Where we go from a Scorpion to Eagle to Phoenix in the Scorpionagle framework. Thank you for joining me again. Now let's just get something straight. You do not have trust issues. You don't have trust issues, you don't just pick the wrong men, and you are not unlucky in love. Because if that were true, it would be random. But it is not random. It is a pattern, a pattern that we've been living in throughout our lifetime. And patterns are definitely learned. We have brought, you know, to from generation to generation. And in the last episode, I talked about how I was daddy's little girl. I talked about the illusion that I lived with. I talked about that wound that has been following me around for years and I was living unaware or ignoring what I knew to be true. What happens when the first man that you trusted, the first man who taught you love. Now that love, your first love, your daddy's love, it teaches you everything about how love is going to be. It also teaches you confusion. So it's one thing to have a wound, and it's another thing to realize that that wound has been choosing your relationships, has been choosing my relationships. You think you have a type. No, you think you're just attracted to a certain kind, that magnetic love, that chemistry. You think you just know what you like, but no, no, no, no, no. You are recognizing what feels familiar. It is that conditioning from your past, from what your father wound taught you how to love, how to be in relationships, how to be a man or a woman. Mother wounds also teaches us how to be in relationships, and we stay in that familiar feeling. And sometimes when we're in that feeling, that familiarity, that's not always healthy. Now, familiarity, familiarity is what your nervous system was trained on. Familiar is what love looked like to you first. So think about this. When you find someone, and when you find yourself chasing someone that is hard to reach, and you have to explain yourself over and over because you feel like if you told them a different way, they're gonna understand. You feel like if you tell them, they're gonna get it. And you start to accept things that you said you were never gonna accept. Because just if you know they understand this one piece, if just if you said this one thing, they're gonna finally get it. But no, because we're going through the pattern, because we've been so familiar with that old love, we're taking that old love. If your dad, if you had to chase your dad for love, then you'll be chasing for love. And that's not a personality thing. Again, it's his programming. The first man who taught you love also taught you what to tolerate, what to accept, the kind of love that you are going to put up with. And it sounds crazy because we're all human beings, we're all autonomous, and we make our own decisions. But our instincts are leading us, are guiding us, it's ingrained in us. Now, if that fatherly love taught us what to tolerate, it taught us what to chase, what to excuse, what to accept. Let me tell you something I had to sit with. And this one is hard, it's very difficult. Now, I didn't just see the pattern in my relationship, I saw the pattern in my parents' relationship. I watched my father breadcrumb my mother. And if you don't know what breadcrumb is, he would give her pieces of his time and make her tell her little things to make her feel special, to keep her on the hook, you know, like dropping little breadcrumbs, and she would continue to chase. And that would make her feel special. But the thing is, he was living another reality. He was living another life. And he just gave her enough, just enough love, just pieces of love to kept her on the hook, to kept her wanting more, because she thought if, you know, when he was upset, you know, he would like give her a little opening to say, oh, he loves me, but if I did this better, he would give her just enough presence, just enough attention to keep her there, to keep her staying, keep her believing whatever he was selling. And at the same time, at the same time, he was somewhere else, telling another woman, doing the same thing to another woman, and laying that foundation for another daughter, for another child as to what to expect. He was giving his energy, his attention to another woman, to another life, another set of children. And notice I didn't say child, I said children. And then I realized something that shook me. While I was watching my dad breadcrumb my mom, my ego awareness came in. I realized he did the same thing to me. He made me believe I was his only daughter. He made me believe I was only his only child for a period of time. He made me believe I was special. And I carried that identity. Carried that identity like I was chosen, like I was different. Like I was his little girl. I was his only little girl. All while there was a son 30 minutes up the road in Jamaica from us that I didn't know at the time. You know, when I was like nine years old, when I was, you know, just over there, you know, being daddy's little girl and everything like that. He had a son 30 minutes up the road that I never knew about. And then he had a daughter 10 minutes down. So what I thought was dad being honest with me, but that was all an illusion. What I thought was a special connection between us was an illusion, was uh was not real. What I thought was closeness was compartmentalization. What I thought was love was division. Because what he did to my mother, he trained me to normalize without words, just by what I saw, because nobody spoke in this household. So what my dad, my dad normalized that behavior. And so when I got into a relationship, none of that felt foreign. When I was getting breadcrumbed, that was not foreign to me. Sometimes I just felt like this is what I should expect. And for my ex-husband, breadcrumbed me. He made me feel like I was chosen. And I was so busy as a child thinking that I was not going to do exactly what my mother did, that I didn't see that I was repeating that own experience. Because my ex-husband breadcrumbed me in a different way. Or so I thought. Same pattern, different man. I realized I wasn't choosing from clarity. I was choosing from what was ingrained. What I saw, I was choosing from familiarity. And I found myself attracted to men who were hard to reach. Men who I had to overgive. I had to overperform. I confused anxiety, yes, I said anxiety, with chemistry. I accepted breadcrumbs that I swore I would never be like my mother. I would soar I would never let a man treat me this way. But all the while I was being breadcrumbed. It was in my DNA. I had to wake up. I was staying too long. You stay too long sometimes in a relationship. You need reassurance, but you still don't feel secure. You're drawn to being the exception. You normalize, right? So I thought I was doing it differently. I thought I was not going down the same paths, making the same mistake as my parents. And and you just normalize that confusion and you audition for a role instead of discern what is happening in this situation. And some parts of you became so strong, so independent, because you said I will never need a man like that again. But underneath that, under deep inside, underneath all that strength is a part of you that still wants to be protected. You still want to be loved. You still want to be safely loved. Because let's be real, love, safety, and protection, you don't know what that is. I don't know what that is. That's something I'd been searching for for years and years. Now, I was with a person for 32 years. 32 years. And something was always missing. I thought my that was my best friend, and if I could give anybody my heart, if I could give anybody my everything, he would have been the one. But I couldn't give my ex-husband my heart because it was never mine to give. It was already taken, broken, and tossed aside and betrayed to the first man I ever loved.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

The first man I gave my heart to. My father.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

So I stayed with my ex-husband longer than I should because I felt I was protecting myself. I felt like I could handle it because I had put a barrier around my heart. I stayed in a relationship, but I never fully opened up. I was always watching, waiting for him to mess up. And this was subconsciously because I didn't know that's what I was doing. And I realized this after the divorce, after we broke up, after my awareness, my ego awareness kicked in. I was always waiting, always expecting, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was waiting for him to cheat on me. I was waiting for him to do something. I said, I know, because these men are cheaters, men are liars, because that's the precedent that was set. That's what I expected from men. But I played this role. How could I be a wife? How could I be in love if I never gave my heart fully? I never opened up, I never trusted. That's not real. That's a mask that I'm I'm wearing, that I was wearing. And talk about living double lives. Because we tell ourselves, or we want to hear, and in our brain, in our head, we're living a separate life than what's really going on and what's existing. And we tell ourselves that, you know, the other person is the one. But I picked my ex-husband because he was he we trauma bonded. That he I saw pieces of my father in him. That's why I chose him. Or that's why he was chosen. And when he told me he got another woman pregnant, that was the moment. Like, that was the key. I was like, you see, I knew it all along. I knew this was gonna happen. And I said that was the door. I stepped through it and I said I would never return. Well, not under those conditions, anyways. I wouldn't return. And let me be clear. I said before that I respected him, my ex-husband, for telling me the truth about the baby. It took him some time, but he told me eventually about the truth. And I respected that. And I meant that. I still do. But that does not mean that I stay. That does not mean I go back. It doesn't mean I get to erase myself again. It doesn't mean I accept it. Because truth does not erase the pattern. It simply means he chose honesty in that moment. That was his line. But me walking away, me deciding that this was not the life for me, as much as I cared about him, as much as I've we built a life together. Me walking away was me breaking a pattern of staying, breaking the generational cycle. Because if I stayed, I was continuing to relive my mother's life, my grandmother's lives, maybe my aunt's life. I was reliving the women from my generations that saw the patterns of their mothers, their grandmothers, their grand-great grandmothers. And I had to ask myself, how many generations does this thing live through? My job was not to fix my ex-husband. No, that was never my job. My job was to free myself, break my chains, and take that my reign. And let me take this even deeper. Because I still speak to my ex-husband. I still speak to my father. And my father, it's important. I never had the conversation with him about my sister. No, I never had that conversation. We never had that conversation. To this day, you would think that we have spoken about it. Never spoke about my brother, never spoke about my my this sister. Because we think that breaking the cycle means that we have to have a confrontation, that we have to talk about something. No, no. Breaking the cha the change doesn't always mean speaking the truth or talking about something. Because sometimes breaking the cycle looks like silence. Breaking the cycle looks like acceptance. I've accepted who my father is, and I've accepted who my ex-husband is. Because my father has not changed. My ex-husband has done some growth. And but with my father, he has not changed. And I cannot expect something different from someone who has not chosen to change. So I choose how I engage. I choose when I engage, if I engage. That's the power. That's how you take back your reign. I choose how much access I give to anyone in my life. Because at this juncture, giving access to everyone, it drains you. Trying to get a resolution, trying to pick up the baggage of the past, that's not gonna heal you. It's gonna hurt you. Because the only person I can change is myself. People do not change, or people do not take back their reign unless they want to. You cannot force it, you cannot argue it. You cannot love them into it. They have to choose it. So sometimes breaking the silence looks like choosing silence, protecting your heart, protecting your power. Because my father was repeating his father's footsteps because he was an abandoned child as well. He was a secret child. And what he did was not random, it was repeated. It was done to him, and he did it unto other children. That's a generational pattern for sure. Me, I chose to stop. The scorpion, you feel the pull, the eagle, you see the pattern. And once you see a pattern, you cannot unsee it. You cannot undo it. And the phoenix, those are your choices. And you choose differently when you get to this Scorpionagel framework. Because doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Healing is not about finding a better man, it is about finding a better you, a better version of yourself. Healing is not about finding a better woman either. Healing is about being a man or a woman that doesn't choose from their wound. My father didn't just break my trust. Right, Manchin? He taught me how to love. He taught me what divided love looks like. And until I saw that I was choosing men who knew how to love me in pieces, you don't have trust issues. You have a pattern, but the patterns can be broken, and this is how we go from survival to sovereignty. This is how you take back your reign. Until next time, this has been suit and boot standing up in truth, transformation, and breaking out of trauma.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

From scorpion to eagle to phoenix where we go to scorpion eagle through life's experiences. Take care.